THE SIMPSON MURDER CASE : O.J. and A.C.: Bond Transcends Time, Tragedy : Friends: The boyhood pals were together through pro football careers and beyond. Acquaintances say Simpson ‘took care of’ Al Cowlings, who was at his side to the end.

For as long as anyone can remember, it was O.J. and Al. Homeboys, teammates, soul mates. Together to the end.

From the unforgiving streets of Potrero Hill in San Francisco to the rough and tumble of the National Football League and life beyond, O.J. Simpson and Al Cowlings found their lives repeatedly intertwined.

So when Simpson fled Friday from murder charges, there was a certain awful symmetry that brought Cowlings to his side again.

“Al followed O.J. like his shadow, both in their youth and afterward,” said Joe Bell, who played high school football with both men in San Francisco. “They were joined at the hip, you might say.”

It was Cowlings who was with Simpson when he slipped away from an Encino residence just before he was supposed to turn himself in, according to District Atty. Gil Garcetti and Simpson’s attorney, Robert Shapiro. It was Cowlings, 47, police say, who piloted his Ford Bronco on a desperate and futile getaway attempt. And it was Cowlings, dressed in black, who seemed to be trying to negotiate Simpson’s surrender as the nation watched on television. Now, like Simpson, Cowlings is under arrest, being held at Los Angeles County Jail on $250,000 bond, facing charges of harboring a fugitive.

“If O.J. could depend on one guy, it was A.C.,” said former Los Angeles Rams General Manager Don Klosterman, who knows both men well. “There was total loyalty. I’m sure A.C. (didn’t) even think he (was) breaking the law, knowing him. He just made a deal to help out his friend.”

That is the way it had always been. Cowlings and Simpson’s deep bond was forged through the struggle of growing up poor in one of San Francisco’s toughest neighborhoods. On Potrero Hill, a kid met an invitation for trouble on every corner.

They were the tightest duo in a larger group of about 15 high school athletes who founded a social club called the Superiors. The group hosted dances and parties around San Francisco, helping members to earn money--and dates.

The two were also teammates on the Galileo High School football team, where Cowlings was the biggest, beefiest member of the squad, weighing about 220 pounds by his senior year.

“Al would be there for O.J. and O.J. would be there for Al,” said Lefty Gordon, a social worker who knew both men as teen-agers on Potrero Hill. “O.J. had a lot of influence on Al. They had been extremely close.”

The friendship even survived one of the tougher challenges young men in high school can face--the theft of a girlfriend. As Bell tells it, Cowlings was dating Marguerite Whitley--a statuesque girl considered a prime catch--before Simpson swept her off her feet in an episode reminiscent of Cyrano de Bergerac.

“When Al was younger, he had this stutter, and he never felt he could express himself right to Marguerite,” Bell recalled. “So he asked O.J., his buddy, to help him out and tell her things. Well, O.J. told her things all right. But he wound up spinning more yarn for himself than he did for Al, and Marguerite ended up with him.”

When he first spotted Simpson with his girl, Cowlings yelled and even tried to roll the new couple’s car over, another friend said. “But a week or two later, they’d patched things right back up,” said the friend, Calvin Tennyson.

Simpson and Marguerite Whitley went on to marry.

Said Bell, who now owns Lady Di’s Thrift Shop in Richmond: “Most of us went our separate ways after high school. But after O.J. made it, Al figured he could too.”

Cowlings, a defensive end, was a year behind Simpson in school, but he followed O.J. almost like an adoring fan. O.J. left Galileo for San Francisco City College. So did Al. O.J. transferred from City College to USC. So did Al, where he was part of a defensive line known as the Wild Bunch.

When it came time to head to the pros in 1969, Simpson became the top draft pick of the Buffalo Bills. A year later, Cowlings was a first-round choice of the same team, and the homeboys were together again.

“They said, of all the guys, that Al was the closest to The Juice,” said Vic Carucci, who covers the Bills for the Buffalo News. “They hung together a lot. Al was more or less his trusted confidante.”

Cowlings was never an all-pro or a standout, whereas Simpson was touted from the start as perhaps “the best who ever lived.” In a few years, Cowlings was traded to Houston and then to Los Angeles, where he played for the Rams.

Klosterman, who was with the Rams then, recalls Cowlings as an emotional lightning rod for the team. “He was a spirit guy,” Klosterman said. “He was the life of the team. He kept everyone going. He was an upper, always an upper. It was so much like him to be helping out and doing things.”

With both men in the twilight of their careers, fate brought them together again when they were traded to the San Francisco 49ers. Both retired in 1979.

Just as he ran with the football, Simpson shifted into his new life without breaking stride. Quickly, he became a football commentator and ad pitchman.

Less is known about Cowlings’ life after football. His name was listed this week on the mailbox of an apartment on San Vicente Boulevard in Santa Monica, but a neighbor said he had only stopped by briefly in the last several months.

Friends reported that Cowlings had worked for a time as a bartender at a West Los Angeles steakhouse. In the late 1980s, he appeared in several episodes of an HBO sitcom starring Simpson, called “First and Ten.” Simpson played the coach of a pro football team packed with overgrown adolescents.

A bit TV roll and other such favors from O.J. typified the relationship, said Tennyson, the San Francisco man who played high school ball with them.

“O.J. takes care of Al; he always has,” Tennyson said. “He pushed him to get his grades up so he could go to USC, then he brought him to the Bills and then to the 49ers. Alan owes his career and pretty much everything else to O.J.”

In later years, Cowlings became something of a bodyguard for his old pal and was a regular visitor at Simpson’s Brentwood mansion. Simpson became a suave and honored man of the word, but Cowlings never polished down the rough edges of the street, Tennyson said.

“He never seemed to want to make something of himself, for himself,” Tennyson said. “He was just content to hang out, have no responsibilities and rely on O.J.”

On Thursday, Cowlings was there with Simpson as always. Outside the Brentwood church where Nicole Simpson was eulogized, Cowlings stationed himself as gatekeeper and greeter. He waved familiar cars into the church parking lot, briefly questioned others and greeted many of the mourners with hugs.

When another friend read a note from Simpson Friday, the murder suspect thanked many people. But he saved a special line for Cowlings.

“Especially A.C.,” Simpson wrote, “thanks for being in my life.”